Holy Spirit & Scrap Metal

Holy Spirit & Scrap Metal

My wife and I were recently cleaning some of the residual debris left by the previous owner of our house. Around the pool there was abandoned poolside furniture; chairs that had seen better days: cushions unweathered and paint instead of rust decorating the frames. We could have gotten rid of them when we moved in and we could have waited for another day to do our “Spring” cleaning…but we didn’t. It would have been my preference for the previous home owner to have discarded them before we moved in…but they didn’t. Instead, on a random Monday, at approximately 4:10pm, I hauled them out to the curbside and hoped that the garbage man would take them away in the morning.

Before I could get the final chair out, a red truck pulled up and a man began loading them. Someone decided they could salvage them for their house or refurbish these old chairs and sell them. Either way they were not my problem anymore! As I assured the man they were trash and that he was welcome to take them, I recognized the song blairing out of his open doors:

“Holy, holy, holy, I want to be holy like You are…”

When I realized he was listening to David Crowder I asked, “What church are you a part of?”

He told me the name of the church and launched into a quick lesson about Jesus and the scriptures. He launched into a barrage of Charismatic slurs, Bible verses, Christian cliches, and he even added a quick gospel message in before he was done. If I were completely honest I would have to admit that I was annoyed. Ain’t nobody got time for that… Eventually he realized I was a Christian by my agreement of his Gospel presentation and I told him about my church too. He told me about how he lost his job and about how he connected to a small house church and began a ministry for ex-convicts who are just out of prison. The most surprising part of the conversation came when I asked him what he was doing with the chairs. He said the Holy Spirit told him to drive around our neighborhood looking for scrap metal to turn in for gas money and saw me hauling the chairs out!

I wrote a couple of weeks back about kairos moments and expecting God to be moving in powerful ways at any moment. I believe God was possibly asking me through this situation if I expect Him to see him move at any moment in powerful ways.